Castle of Osios Loukas

Above the celebrated monastery of Osios Loukas in Boeotia, a hilltop holds the scant ruins of a small castle whose history is largely unwritten. The fortifications show two distinct building phases: an ancient circuit of large, well-dressed stones, and a medieval addition of smaller rubble set in mortar. The most prominent survivor is a ruined tower, possibly Byzantine or Frankish. In classical times the area belonged to Steiris, whose acropolis stood on a neighbouring hill a kilometre to the southeast; that city was sacked by the Macedonians in 346 BC and again by the Romans in 147 BC, and it may be that the population then shifted to this more defensible height. The monastery below, founded in the tenth century and richly patronised in the eleventh, was itself guarded by an early Byzantine fortification. The tower most plausibly dates to the eleventh century, though a Frankish or Catalan origin between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries is conceivable, if less likely given its divergence from typical Frankish towers in central Greece.